Louisiana: The Rougarou & Bigfoot

Louisiana doesn't give you one monster. It gives you two.On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, we head into the bayous and river swamps of the Pelican State for a full double feature.

First up is the rougarou, the Cajun werewolf that crossed the Atlantic with exiled French farmers, survived the Acadian expulsion, and settled into the swamps of south Louisiana, where it's been enforcing Lent and scratching at shutters for two hundred and fifty years. We dig into the loup-garou's roots in the werewolf trials of medieval France, the Catholic morality machine that kept the legend alive, the strange rulebook of the curse itself, from the hundred and one days to the thirteen coins by the door, and the encounter stories that suggest people down the bayou are still seeing something.

A young woman paced for four miles by amber eyeshine on a dark bayou road. Three fearless hog dogs that refused one cut of swamp for two weeks straight. A calf struck on the highway that wasn't there when the driver walked back. Then we cross the Pearl River into seventy thousand acres of nowhere for the Honey Island Swamp Monster.

In August of nineteen sixty-three, an air traffic controller named Harlan Ford and his hunting partner Billy Mills watched a seven-foot, gray-haired figure stand up out of a clearing and look back at them, and the case that followed includes torn-out boar throats, disputed plaster casts, a missing fisherman, and a reel of Super Eight film that Ford's family didn't find until after he was gone.

From there we widen out to Louisiana's full Sasquatch record, including the Earl Whitstine logging case reported to the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office in the year two thousand, the Kisatchie National Forest reports, and firsthand accounts from hunters, campers, and one duck hunter who sat in a pirogue until sunrise because something stood up out of the water ten yards away.

Two monsters. One silhouette. By the end of this episode, you may start to wonder, like I did, whether Cajun Louisiana has been describing the same flesh-and-blood animal all along, in whatever language the porch light allowed.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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